The Philosophical Dimensions of the Origin of Species. Part Two

THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. PART TWO VI. THE ERROR OF UNIVOCALLY ONTOLOGIZED KIND-ESSENCES From the title of this section one might expect it to develop the contention that the specific structures causally accounted for by contemporary science are contrarily related to the texture and sense of the traditional principles governing the recognition of specific distinctions in the world of bodies. Perhaps unfortunately , we must develop a rather more complex contention. The contention to be developed at this point is that an ontological survey of the landscape of Darwin's world shows that, so far as its metaphysical structure is concerned, the knowledge of evolutionary species has not altered the structure of the traditional species problematic but has, on the contrary, clarified its secondary implications so as to make its options clearer and their alternatives more definite. In showing this, the survey in question shall have, on the one side, to clear away the morass of philosophical perplexities in post-Darwinian thought due not to the accumulation of evolutionary data (as Dewey thought and as commonly supposed) but primarily and directly to those ambiguities and uncertainties latent in Classical Antiquity's notion itself of species, whose features the labor of evolutionary research has forced to the fore. This will be the direct concern of the present section. On the other side, it will remain to show that the forthright acknowledgment and philosophical resolution of these no longer latent ambiguities and uncertainties render the evolutionary data themselves more intelligible in their own line of explanation which is not mathematical (species are not numbers) but that of natural philosophy , wherein are assigned reasons for the changes that never cease around us. This will be the concern of Section VIII below, where the problem of the criterion of evolutionary progress at last comes into view. ~51 JOHN N. DEELY Mortimer Adler was perhaps the first to see clearly and perhaps the only one to state clearly that " most of the philosophical perplexities in post-Darwinian thought are due to ambiguities and uncertainties in the notion of species itself rather than to the discovery of any radically significant facts." 153 The ambiguities and uncertainties in question, I think, can be traced to seven sources, four of which are matters of properly philosophical argumentation, one socio-·cultural, one psychological, and one theological. 1) Most fundamentally, it was the enculturated conception of the eternal heavens which deflected even the most penetrating of the classical and medieval analyses of the ontological character of the natural kinds encountered in common experience.154 Since the unchanging 188 Tke Problem of Species, p. 10. ••• For Aristotle and St. Thomas, it was the eternal space-time of the celestial spheres which determined the place and order of sublunary bodies, and so tile rigid necessity and formal immutability of their natures. The Aristotelian essences of material beings do not have their cosmological reference to what we understand today by the physical environment but to the unchanging heavens which, as instruments of the separated intelligences, were regarded as the causa regitiva, the governing cause, of tile physical world. E. g., cf. St. Thomas, In Ill Met., lect. 11, n. 487: "... in the twelfth book [1078a14-1078b17; in Comm., lect. 9, " The Number of Primary Movers "] . . . the Philosopher shows that tile first active or moving principles of all things are the same but in relation to a certain order or rank. For first indeed are tile principles without qualification incorruptible and immobile. There are, however, following on tllese, the incorruptible and mobile principles, to wit, the heavenly bodies, which by their motion cause generation and corruption in the world." In Bk. VII, lect. 6, no. 1408, in connection with the question of spontaneous generation, reference is similarly made " to the power of the heavens, which is the universal regulating power of generations and corruptions in tllese lower bodies. . . ." For a full discussion, see Thomas Litt's study of Les Corps celestes crons l'univers de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1968), from the "Introduction " and " Conclusion " to which the following observations indicate the justice of my own allegations in this matter: "L'opinion courante, dans le monde des specialistes...